WebRender newsletter #13

Greetings! Time for issue #13 of your favorite newsletter, where you can follow the progress of WebRender and its integration in Gecko. We are still busy fixing correctness issues (as you can see by the number of times the word “fixed” appears in the lists below), modulo Glenn’s usual big perf optimization.

If you are interested in looking inside of WebRender to understand how it works and/or debug it, check out Kvark’s latest blog post about the frame recording tool he just added to WebRender.

Post navigation

8 thoughts on “WebRender newsletter #13”

I would be very interested in reading about the font rendering implementation of WebRender. Does it use Pathfinder by Patrick Walton right now? How final is the current font rendering implementation? Will the additional blur be fixed in the foreseeable future?

WebRender’s font rendering doesn’t use pathfinder yet. For now we have a CPU font rasterization backend for each platform[1] in order to match the OS’s text look and feel. Glyphs are cached in a texture atlas and rendered as quads (classic font implementation).

If the rendering looks incorrect (different than in Firefox without WR), then it’s a bug and it will eventually get fixed.

I enabled `gfx.webrender.all` on Nightly to test it. When testing stylo, it was not necessary to restart Firefox. Since I did not see any difference, I restarted Nightly. But then still no difference. My questions:

1. Is it neccessary to restart Nightly so that changes to `gfx.webrender.all` take effect?
2. I heard WebRender is only enabled for certain (whitelist) graphic cards. Is there some about:* page which tells me that WebRender got in fact enabled?
3. Since I can see no difference whatsoever (I tried twitter and various news sites), can you point me to a demo page (some really crazy css animations site or similar) where I could “feel”/see WebRender making a difference?

All of these information should also be added to the “Enabling WebRender in Firefox Nightly” section in this or future blog posts for fellow testers or people who want to try it.